Reframe is a monthly column in which contributor Sam Falb discusses timely openings to view in New York. Each edition offers commentary on the latest exhibitions, performances, and installations. Dynamic and ever-evolving, the content reflects the fluidity of the market it travels through.
Love is in the air, you might say about this issue. After all, a plurality of these shows express notions of love – whether it be about the self and one’s identity, a symbolic chalice that commemorates the sanctity of marriage, or the connection between an artist and their craft, no matter how taxing or imaginatively demanding. While the blustery winds and deep chill of a New York winter (and false spring, for those in town during the achingly balmy past weekend) intimidate us from traveling far beyond our doors, galleries have opened their spaces with shows that interrogate notions of intimacy, interpersonal connection, and the networks of warmth that human connection solidifies. It’s with this sentiment that readers are encouraged to step outside their doors, bundle up, and immerse oneself in something new across the city’s network of artistic spaces – where notions of love, in all its varied forms, await discovery.
Galerie Timonier: Orange (February 15 – March 15)
While much of the New York fashion cabal decamps to Europe for a month of shows, us state-side gallery goers benefit from one of fashion’s favorite duos: Tanya and Zhenya Posternak. The poster, in editions of yellow and black by design duo Faye & Gina, sets the stage for a Postnerak-ian embrace of hyperreal and playful proportions. An egg, lifesize, sits in a petite frame with a brown shading cloaking its borders. Beyond the canvas next to two wide windows, Tribeca hums along and cars whiz by, unaware of this now-rare luxury (vis à vis current shortages) perched smartly on Timonier’s far wall. A face peeks out from beneath sheaves of golden blonde hair, a peppermint green straw pressed between lips. An invisible wind pushes the strands to and fro, revealing deep skin and a single, searching eye—an image that feels at once intimate and detached. The size of the canvas seems to mirror the emotional takeaway from the subjects within; a small child’s mournful expression is situated within a similarly small framing. In contrast, an eye – wide, overwhelmed, and on the brink of releasing a single teardrop — dominates its own wall, the blown-up silhouette demanding sole ownership of the space. In these works, the Posternaks amplify emotion and subjects into complex storytellers, enticing viewers into their intoxicating orbit through a single shot. They distill feeling into form with a precision that is at once sharp and dreamlike. Exhibition text states it best: “It’s far more difficult to create an image which is a unique idea, rather than to create an image which is solely technically proficient. The Posternaks do both successfully.”
Jacqueline Sullivan Gallery: The Loving Cup (February 14th-April 12th, 2025)
A cabinet of curios greet viewers at Jacqueline Sullivan’s decidedly quant, salon-meets-Wunderkammer space on the fourth floor of the 52 Walker gallery building. Between the enviable design influences constructed by Nick T. Poe and the richesse of items including craft-forward vases, chairs, sculptureworks, thoughtful cabinetry, and lighting fixtures, one must stop to think that The Loving Cup, as the exhibition is named, has aptly runneth over (sorry). At its heart, the show illustrates a warm-hued landscape of material intimacy—the way an object invites a hand, a glance, a moment of pause. The group show is made up of contributions by A History of Frogs (their Tithonus is not to be missed), Cara Bauermeister, Ficus Interfaith, Jordan McDonald, Skye Chamberlain, and Sophie Stone. The titular cup is, as the gallery explains, “a decorative vessel that historically commemorates a marriage union, representing the promise of love, honor and good fortune. Inscribed with the nuptial date and the names of the betrothed, it exists as a sober testament to enduring fondness and fidelity.” That sense of devotion—both to craft and to the intimate histories objects hold—threads through the exhibition, transforming Sullivan’s space into something between a domestic tableau and an otherworldly vault of creative artifacts.
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art: Young Joon Kwak: RESISTERHOOD (February 14-July 27)
As you step into the world of this exhibition, take in the public window display of neon sculptures, then listen closely to the soundscape composed by drag-electronic-dance-noise band Xina Xurner (featuring the presenting artist Young Joon Kwak and Marvin Astorga) with Johanna Hedva, Anna Luisa, and Dorian Wood). Weave through the selection of suspended sculptures encrusted with dainty jewels, a bronze bust, and the deeply moving Resisters, a cocktail of urethane resin, soil, glitter, rocks, aluminum, nickel silver, glass rhinestones, and wax pigment which combine to form the combined faces of two individuals locked in an intimate facial embrace. “Showing my work at the world’s only LGBTQIA+ art museum is a celebration of our shared histories and an open invitation to reimagine what we can be together,” the artist shared. It’s a call to see ourselves in each other and to rise together in RESISTERHOOD—in which queer and trans lives will not only survive but shimmer, dazzle, and transform the future.” With the museum’s curatorial touch provided by Stamatina Gregory, Kwok explores the body through inspiration (and sometimes direct molding) of the bodies of friends, loved ones, and collaborators. To Refuse Looking Away from Our Transitioning Bodies (Pregnant Kim) and To Refuse Looking Away from Our Transitioning Bodies (Me And My Fat *****) are perhaps most triumphantly emblematic of this theme, sparkling in technicolor glitter and bathed in iridescent hues that shift with the light, demanding both presence and reverence. These works, like much of Kwak’s practice, defy the binary constraints of form and material, instead offering a kaleidoscopic vision of embodiment—one that embraces transition, flux, and the radical act of being seen.
Matthew Marks: Laura Owens (February 14-April 19)
Enter into this show with the utmost level of mystery you can muster, for what awaits will awaken something childlike, candy-coated, and truly unimaginable in the mind. The world Laura Owens has built is unlike any conventional exhibition format currently available. It’s immersive, with rooms cloaked in vivid hues akin to a delicate, sunset sky or landscapes that resemble a thicket in a lush, breathing forest. Texture is central – for watchful eyes, licks of paint can be seen breaching from the walls like petite tongues. In a woodsy, backroom landscape, two crows chat amongst themselves while a sweeping vista of deep blue waves meets a vertical field of wildflowers and leafy, emerald-green foliage. One has the sensation almost of Alice in the Looking Glass, aka, being shrunk down, down, down, and, ever curious, stepping through a large door (of which there are a few in varied layers of intricate decoration and curation) into an entirely new ecosystem. “This show is like eating the best flavor of ice cream in a cone, in the heat with it kind of going everywhere. It’s blissful, experiential goodness,” neighboring Susan Inglett Gallery and LUmkA director Cortney Connolly said of the show. Every surface hums with a kind of visual static—swaths of neon and pastel mix and harmonize, while delicate details emerge the closer one dares to look, including a crouch-downable BLANK. Some walls are embedded with hidden pockets of motion—fluttering animations that blink like mirages—while others showcase tactile exploration, their surfaces embossed, carved, or layered with thick impasto. Few artists wield playfulness with the same precision and sophistication as Owens. Here, she crafts a universe where nostalgia and newness entwine, where the handmade meets the hyper-digital, and where visual consumption becomes an experience of wonder, (pleasant) disorientation, and delight.
Lisson: Julian Opie (February 13-April 19)
“What exactly is happening at Lisson?” you may wonder to yourself as you duck between the larger-than-life, high-gloss auto paint, aluminum sculptures of Julian Opie, which are interspersed throughout the gallery’s extraordinarily lofty Chelsea space. Opie has orchestrated a city’s intersection of characters weaving to and fro, some heads tilted toward phones while others stare straight ahead in what can be ascertained to be a rather temperate time of year perhaps (t-shirts, a tank, pants, and shorts being worn respectively with no light jacket in sight). The artist takes inspiration from the free-standing architectural legacy of Greek sculpture, as well as pedestrians in Busan, where the 2023 series of twenty statues – Busan Walkers – gets its apt name. Alongside the structural intrigue, be sure to stand in front of the figures in motion along opposite walls—walking, walking, walking for an eternity inside a brightly-lit LED screen. They’re schoolchildren who, as the gallery notes in its exhibition text, have “neutral” faces and clothing, distinguished only by the “basic facts of hairstyle, height, or clothing.” This is Opie’s world: distilled, streamlined, rhythmic. His figures, faceless yet recognizable, become placeholders for an urban condition—one in which movement is constant, identities blur, and the act of walking becomes both an aesthetic gesture and a meditation on contemporary life. The glossy surfaces and LED animations reinforce a sense of detachment, a world reduced to silhouettes and perpetual transit, but not in a harshly critical sense, to be sure. It’s both soothing and eerie: an urban ballet caught in an endless loop.
Fredericks & Freiser: Persona (February 13-March 15)
Cristine Brache’s Dorothy stares at viewers from a canvas layered with the foggy sheen of encaustic above oil and ink. In fact, the myriad eyeballs across many of the works in this show are all staring in various grades of study, disdain, sadness, and tranquil repose. Such is the way of Persona, a group show which derives its name from the titular Ingmar Bergman film, and which dives deep into individual identity, authenticity, artificiality, and how one brings themself to the table of life. Of particular note are Mary Reid Kelley’s Personae and So Blonde – painterly mimicry of wall-tacked paper snippets featuring portraits, worn cardboard, and expressive eyes peering out in the gallery at passing viewers. Admire the craft of it all, Reid Kelley’s vivid illustration as well as the seemingly higgledy-piggledy objects that are tacked to the painted cardboard. Marika Thunder returns with her recognizable mechanical prose – Grace perhaps suggesting a set of metal lungs against a cool, hard esophagus polished in dark tones of silver. The human body meets the machine in the most intimate of fashions, a complex relationship Thunder has explored with eloquence. The exhibition as a whole contemplates the paradox of identity—what is constructed, what is innate, and what, if anything, can be disentangled from the layers of artifice and self-perception. Persona does not offer easy answers but rather invites viewers to sit in the ambiguity, to lock eyes with its many gazes, and to question what they see reflected back.
Outsider Art Fair: Progressive Art Studio Collective x Shelter Gallery (February 27-March 2)
Were you able to make it to the Outsider Art Fair this past weekend? No matter, as perhaps one of the most important highlights of the show lives on in a digital and in-person community in Detroit and Wayne County, Michigan under the umbrella of the Progressive Art Studio Collective (PASC). “This is the first time that PASC has presented at the fair. We’re a very young program, and we work with about 190 artists with disabilities,” program founder Anthony Marcellini shared on the sidelines of the group’s booth, where curious visitors could step in to explore the mounted canvases as well as a portfolio of selected works on paper that the team had transported for the fair. Presenting under the banner of New York-based Shelter Gallery, the limited-run show provided insight into the expansive program that the group offers back home in Michigan – allowing participants to develop their individual artistic practices and develop skills for artistic career paths. Highlights included the transportive colored pencil drawings of Chantell Donwell, intimate visualizations of various settings through her watchful eye, as well as the watercolors of Keisha Miller, who depicts the bright expressions of her subjects and their vivid surroundings with a technique-meets-whimsical experimentation poise.
Industry Recommendation: Independent Designer and VP of Global Creative, Christie’s, Arsh Raziuddin
The Print Center: Heaven in a Wildflower (January 23-May 21)
Born in Nandanoor in 1925, Krishna Reddy was a trailblazing sculptor and printmaker whose craft and values have influenced generations of artists. The Print Center in New York City is presenting his first print-focused exhibition in nearly fifty years, Heaven in a Wildflower, offering a rare opportunity to engage with printmaking, an art form which has historically been overlooked. Reddy’s innovative viscosity printing technique reflects the layers of human experience, the necessity of connecting with nature, and resistance to the relentless mechanization of modern life. His art bridges the spiritual, cultural, and natural worlds, celebrating the diversity of humanity in both personal and collective struggles, the enduring power of craft, and how experimentation can reveal new possibilities. Whether experiencing prints like Clown Falling or his sculpture Demonstrators, Reddy’s work stands— in an age dominated by screens, headlines, and misinformation—offering a grounding escape, a disruption, that reconnects us to ancient traditions.
Written by Sam Falb
